CONTENTS1 INTRODUCTION2 STEEL TAPE3 OPTICAL FILM4 DIRECTLY-CUT DISKS5 MAGNETIC TAPE6 PORTABLE RECORDING7 CARTS AND DARTS8 DIGITAL RECORDING
AND PLAYOUT
Steel tape had proved useful, but was awkward and not of the best sound
quality. During the war, monitors became aware that the Germans were
evidently able to make high-quality recordings, since Hitler's
speeches were being broadcast at all hours in what sounded like 'live'
quality: during the invasion a number of radio stations were captured,
equipped with recorders using ¼-inch tape on a cellulose acetate base,
coated with a fine layer of iron oxide (Fe2O3)
- paper had been in use as a base just before the war but
broke so
easily that it was impracticable.

The
BBC acquired some
Magnetophone machines (left) in 1946 on an experimental basis, and
these were used in the early stages of the new Third Programme to
record and playback performances of operas from Germany (live relays
being problematic because of the unreliability of the landlines in the
immediate post-war period). The tapes ran at 30
inches/second (ips), and the flexible base provided much better contact
with
the head: the main reason for the improvement in the sound was the
addition of a high-frequency current at 100kHz to the audio signal,
which avoided the inherent distortion in the magnetization process.

These machines were used until 1952, though most of the work continued
to be done
using the established media; but from 1948 a new British
model became available from EMI: the BTR1. Though in many ways clumsy,
its quality was good, and as it wasn't possible to obtain any more
Magnetophones it was an obvious choice. There was some difficulty with
the tape: early EMI tape was very prone to print-through (where the
magnetic image on one layer causes the next layer on the spool to pick
up a faint version, causing pre- and post-echoes, often through several
layers) - I've been told that the BBC told EMI to sort this out or they
would stop using tape. The effect remained in later years, but much
diminished and normally not a serious problem.

We
still had one of
the BTR1s in the 1960s and I've had the doubtful pleasure of using it.
It
was rather a nightmare: the operating buttons were connected to the
mechanics by Bowden cable and were stiff, so you rapidly got a sore
thumb. Worse, the head-block, because of its size, had to be outside
the tape path with the heads facing away from you (and the tape wound
oxide-out) so that marking the tape with a chinagraph pencil involved
leaning over - I'm six feet tall and I found it awkward: shorter
colleagues found it nearly impossible. In the early days, at 30 ips,
people probably just grabbed the tape and cut it - at that speed you
could afford to miss by a couple of inches as long as you weren't doing
music editing. (Early editing was done by holding the tape in mid-air
and using scissors - I once asked a colleague who had done this how he
managed to get the angle consistent: he said, 'Oh, we didn't bother'.
Of course at 30 ips it wouldn't matter much, but one of my more
eccentric colleagues insisted on using scissors at 7½ ips, and his
joints were a menace.)

In the
early 1950s the EMI BTR 2 became
available
(left); a much improved machine and generally liked. It became the
standard in recording channels (rooms) for many years, and was in use
until the end of the 1960s. The machines were responsive, could run up
to speed quite quickly, had light-touch operating buttons,
forward-facing heads, and were quick and easy to do the finest editing
on.

The tape speed was eventually standardized at 15 ips for almost all
work at Broadcasting House, and at 15 ips for music and 7½ ips for
speech at Bush House. The acetate base was replaced by PVC which broke
less easily (though when it did it stretched, whereas acetate snapped
cleanly and was easy to repair: stretched PVC was a disaster). The
standard 10½ inch reels ran for half an hour at 15 ips with standard
thickness tape (1.5 thousandths of an inch - 'long play' tape at 1
thousandth was available for domestic use but stretched too easily for
broadcast use). In the end Bush House abandoned 15 ips for pretty well
everything: and in 1971 embarked on an ill-advised experiment to use 3¾
ips to cut down on the considerable cost of tape. We all told them it
wouldn't work: and it didn't - after a few weeks it was abandoned as
the quality couldn't be maintained and joints tended to lift off the
head in passing through.

The
BTR 1 and 2 revolutionized broadcasting. The
quality was
indistiguishable from live on transmission, and the finest editing
could
be done quickly and easily by practised engineers; instead of film
cement or soldering irons the simple application of sticky tape to the
edited tape held in a block made the process much simpler (right).
Variety programmes
could be recorded on Sunday, allowing the performers to appear in
Music-Halls during the week, and the producer could edit the programme
to tighten it up, get it to the correct length, and remove dubious
jokes which had been slipped in (always a problem in the 1930s). The
machines' speed reliability over 30 minutes was not perfect, so the
tradition arose of programmes running 29 minutes and 30 seconds, with a
1 minute music playout, so that an error of ±30 seconds could be
accomodated (this was before programme junctions were cluttered up with
two minutes of trails).

It
also became normal to 'de-umm' pre-recorded interviews - particularly
in the World Service where the interviewee was often not completely
fluent in English: the most edits I ever had (I actually counted the
number of pieces of sticky tape as they went past on-air) was 75 in a
three-minute interview, though this was abnormally high.

Up
until about 1965 there were no tape machines in studios: Studio
Managers handled the mixing panel and played disks, but never touched
tape - all recording, editing and playback was done in channels (except
that occasionally at Broadcasting House a smaller tape machine was in
use in the studio, but with an engineer in attendance. Producers
weren't allowed to handle tape either - the engineers sent recordings
to a central library and all handling of tapes was carried out by
Engineering Department).

With the increased reliability of tape
the decision was taken to equip studios with tape machines - initially
for playback only, though eventually local recording was introduced and
Studio Managers had to become fully conversant with the machines (there
was some resistance to this as SMs were usually from a non-technical
background). BTR2s were
too big for studio use, and various other machines became available.

Broadcasting
House used the EMI TR90 (left) and a Philips machine which was
lightweight but very easy and quick to use: Bush House used the
Leevers-Rich, initially in the widely-disliked Mark 2 version (right)
but later with the push-button operated Mark 4 - which was an
improvement, though the complicated tape lace-up path was still not
popular.

The
Studer range of machines had become pretty well the studio recording
industry standard by the 1970s, and gradually these replaced the aging
BTR2s (which were now giving flutter and general reliability problems,
with no spares available) in recording rooms and studios: the photo on
the right is of the first model to arrive at Bush House, and later
similar but refined versions were eventually installed in the larger
studios. As delivered the machines had a motorized pair of scissors
which popped out of a slot before the final roller, and was supposed to
be used to edit the tape (you found the place then moved the tape on by
an amount shown on the right-hand roller): it's a daft idea, and after
someone had managed to snip a tape while it was being played up a line
to Scotland (who thought it hilarious) the scissors were disabled to
prevent
further accidents.

Gradually pre-recorded rather than live
programmes - or inserts - became the norm. Recording in sections and
subsequent editing and mixing enabled broadcast plays to be be
assembled with less rehearsal, but something of the 'edge' of classic
live plays such as Under
Milk Wood and The
Dark Tower
was lost in the process. Of course there were new hazards: accidental
erasure (fortunately not common, but it could happen: someone once
placed a 4038 microphone - which contains a very powerful magnet - on
top of a reel of tape, with obvious
results), tapes dropped down lift-shafts or taken home in error (more
than one Studio Manager has been woken in the night and told to bring a
recording needed for overnight transmission back now),
or stretched by mishandling (as an engineer I once saved an SM's skin
by reconstructing the damaged word 'United' from syllables copied from
elsewhere in the recording, and I don't claim any uniqueness about
that).

So the advent of magnetic tape recording had more effect
on radio than anything since its inception (and a similar process was
taking place in television with the invention of video recording); and
one of its major contributions was in providing the ability to make
location recordings without lugging a car-load of touchy disk-cutting
equipment about: portable recording will be examined on the next page.